


All Better

by Im_The_Doctor (Bofur1)



Category: Video Blogging RPF, Youtube RPF
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst and Feels, Crying, Desperation, Detachment, Dissociation, Family Angst, Grief, Grounding, Hallucinations, Here comes the Henrik Pain Train woop woop, Holding Hands, Hugs, I'm Sorry, Memory Loss, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Sensation Experimentation, Touch-Starved, Trauma, mentions of eye trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-14
Updated: 2019-12-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:48:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 810
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21787018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bofur1/pseuds/Im_The_Doctor
Summary: Henrik is still…broken sometimes. That’s only to be expected but knowing that the damage is there doesn’t make it any easier to face it.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 41





	All Better

**Author's Note:**

> Anti tortured Schneep for nine months. That doesn't just go away like nothing.

Henrik was still…broken sometimes. That was only to be expected but knowing that the damage was there didn’t make it any easier to face it.

The Schneep they knew had a boundless mind, a memory like an elephant, before. But this wasn’t before. Sometimes he’d lose things. Some were little. He would ask who had taken his glasses, forgetting that he’d set them down himself, or he would forget not to pull too hard on that loose cabinet handle. Other things, however, were once so _ingrained_ in him that it seemed almost senseless to lose them. It was knowledge he had been taught on some of his earliest days.

Once Chase had found him standing motionless in front of the kitchen counter, his breathing shallow and shivery, his shoulders hunched in. Everything in his posture radiated an air of unsurety.

“Hey…” Chase ventured, using the soft, unassuming tone previously reserved for the times his babies had nightmares. “You feeling alright?”

Unblinking, the doctor lifted his hands to loosely clench and unclench his scarred, spindly fingers before resting them on the coffee maker. “I do not know how to work this.” The emptiness in his voice made Chase feel cold and breathless, air choked off by a lump in his throat.

“Okay. Uh…I’ll show you.”

He forgot Jameson over and over and over again. He would scream when he spotted him, scurrying for Jackie or Marvin’s protection from the stranger, the burglar, Anti in disguise, and with endless, pained patience they would soothe him. “That’s Jameson, remember? Jameson Jackson, born while you were gone. You had coffee together this morning. You remember Jameson Jackson. It’s Jem, it’s JJ, it’s our Jamie.”

When the moment came that recognition dawned in his eyes, it was always accompanied by shame and guilt. He looked like he wanted to sink through the floor. Jameson didn’t look much better.

The Schneep they knew wasn’t one to cry, not before. But this wasn’t before. He cried so often now, with precious little attempts to hide it. He would sit at the dinner table with his head down and his napkin wadded up in his hand to wipe his eyes, insisting through the weak sobs that the others keep eating, don’t mind him, he would pull himself together, it would only be a moment.

It was never just a moment.

Marvin found him curled into a ball on the couch, hands forming a stranglehold around one of the cushions; the beds of his fingernails were turning white. “Schneep, it’s okay. You’re safe, just breathe,” Marvin began, but the presence in his red-rimmed eyes made it clear this wasn’t a panic attack. That said, there was a desperation in them too as he buried his tearstained face against the cushion like his life depended on it.

“I-It’s…so soft,” he whispered tremulously. “So soft. So soft.”

He would cry as he moved throughout the house, touching everything, cataloguing their textures. Soft. Downy. Slippery. Coarse. Lumpy. Bristly. Grainy. Pockmarked.

When the others allowed it, he would touch them too, tracing them with an unfamiliarity that, for a doctor, was completely alien. He had been bereft of them for so long, starved of any true human contact. He had to rememorize how warm and smooth flesh and bone felt, drown out the sensation of static and barbs. If they stayed long enough, he would weep again. Salty.

The Schneep they knew didn’t hallucinate.

Most of the visions were of Anti, naturally. Without warning Schneep would turn his head too fast, his breathing heavy, or would shrink back when his eyes strayed over Chase’s shoulder. He would lunge out of bed to throw himself over Jack’s motionless form, screaming at his tray of tools that he wouldn’t let him be harmed again.

Infinitely more frightening, however, were the times he did nothing. No tears, no flinches—nothing but a dim, dissociated daze.

“Your eyes are gone,” he said to Jackie one day, his voice floaty and hollow. The hero stammered in alarm, momentarily speechless.

“W-What?”

“They are on the floor. They look like Sam.” Slipping out of his chair, he knelt, cupping his hands over the carpet as if to receive a gift. “I can put them back, after we clean the blood from your face. I will fix them for you, _Bruder_ , just give them over carefully. The good doctor will fix.”

Heart sinking like a stone into his stomach, Jackie knelt across from him, covering his hands with his own. “Henrik, look at me.”

He looked. He looked. He looked. It took almost a full minute before his hands relaxed in Jackie’s and he released a soft, shaken breath, seeing familiar eyes blink back at him.

“Oh. All better.”

“Yeah, bud.” He didn’t hesitate to hug him, happy to hide his grief behind Henrik’s back. “All better now.”

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry, I swear. Feel free to yell at me in the comments ^^"


End file.
